The creature is only about two inches (five centimeters) long, but its tongue is nearly three and a half inches (nine centimeters) long—one and a half times longer than the bat's body.

When not collecting nectar from the Centropogon nigricans flower, the bat's tongue is retracted and stored in the animal's rib cage.

In the new high-def video—which aired Sunday as part of the National Geographic Channel's Untamed Americas documentary series—the bat is shown feeding on the wing. (The Channel and National Geographic News are affiliated within the National Geographic Society.)

"These bats can hover," said biologist Nathan Muchhala, who helped discover the species in an Andean cloud forest. "They're like hummingbirds in that sense."

In a close-up, the animal's tongue slithers, snakelike, down the flower's long neck. When the tongue reaches the pool of sweet nectar at the bottom, the tip transforms, becoming suddenly prickly as hairlike structures called papillae extend outward.

"Just before the bat retracts the tongue, the [papillae] stick straight out sideways," said Muchhala, of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "That maximizes the surface area, allowing it to act like a mop and sop up as much nectar as possible."

The system seems to work, and perhaps not surprisingly—tongue and flower are thought to have evolved in tandem over millennia, to the point where C. nigricans can be pollinated only by A. fistulata.

As the furry bat feeds, its bobbing head collects a dusting of pollen, which gets deposited onto the next flower the bat visits.

"It turns out that longer tubes make a bat lift its head up more during a visit," which in turn causes more pollen to get dumped onto the animal's head, said Muchhala, who suspects the species are locked in "coevolutionary race of increasing lengths."